Nick Schwellenbach

Nick Schwellenbach joined the Center for Effective Government as its Senior Fiscal Policy Analyst in March 2013. He is an expert on defense, contractor accountability, and government oversight.
Nick formerly managed the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight’s (POGO) investigations, covering a wide range of topics from financial regulation to drug and medical device safety to the nuclear weapons complex and weaknesses in the Inspector General system. Prior to rejoining POGO, Schwellenbach was a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity from 2008 to 2010, where he wrote about congressional ethics and defense spending. He and the Center were finalists for the 2009 Scripps Howard Raymond Clapper Washington Reporting award for investigative work on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Previously, Schwellenbach was an investigator at POGO from 2004 through 2008. His work on lavish Air Force accommodations for generals was one of three POGO investigations cited by the Society of Professional Journalists when they awarded POGO its prestigious national Sunshine Award for improving government transparency.
Nick has testified before Congress multiple times: on the need for stronger whistleblower protections in order to improve congressional oversight – which, along with years of advocacy by a coalition, ultimately led to the most major reform to federal employee protections in more than a decade; on how to improve contract auditing that led to Congress granting the Defense Contract Audit Agency stronger power to access contractor records; and on how to better prevent and combat U.S.-funded human trafficking in war zones, reforms that made their way into a new executive order and a new law strengthening the anti-trafficking legal framework.
Nick earned his M.A. in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University and his B.A. in History from the University of Texas-Austin. Follow him on Twitter: @schwellenbach

Articles from Contributor

You’re in the military. You blew the whistle. Something bad happened to your career. You ask your military service Inspector General or the big Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate what you believe is reprisal. You’re in good hands, right? Well, maybe not.

File under: Doesn’t make a lick of sense. Thanks to a change stemming from the 2007 defense authorization law, retired generals and admirals can, under the right circumstances, make more in retirement than they can while actually working for the military. USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook has the scoop:

On Friday last week, Raytheon, a major defense contractor, announced it scored a four-star general! Marine Corps Gen. (Ret.) James E. Cartwright, the recently departed vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the …

Americans often believe government bureaucracy often prevails over common sense. This certainly happened to the Air Force earlier this year, when it sought to avoid embarrassment by curtailing its workforce’s communications …

The Air Force has been busy adding more generals. But the same has been happening across the Defense Department, although the overall DoD growth isn’t quite as striking as it is within the Air Force alone. In a post this afternoon on the POGO blog, my colleague Ben Freeman wrote that:

A senior auditor with the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) was subjected to years of reprisal in violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act after she blew the whistle on flawed audits produced by DCAA, according to an April 2010 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigative report made available today by the Project On Government …

The Pentagon’s top official for weapons testing sent a sternly worded letter warning the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program and the Air Force that their plans to start unmonitored flight training on the Air Force variant of the JSF F-35 this fall “risks the occurrence of a serious mishap,” according to an October 21 memo, first …

Each year, hundreds of uniformed members of the military send official complaints to Inspectors General (IGs) within the Department of Defense (DoD) saying that they are the targets of reprisal. Most do not have their claims of reprisal …

Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today asking Panetta to “look in every nook and cranny of the federal government to make sure that we’re getting the most bang for our buck.” Panetta has been aggressively fighting the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department’s budget. But …

To extend on Mark’s post on the growth in generals and admirals relative to the number of troops they command, Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who presided over the Senate hearing, provided the following in a press release:

“Where is it decided and how is it decided that each of these services has the justification or the